Francois Foucart is the recipient of the 2013 Beatrice and Vincent Tremaine Fellowship

Foucart is the 15th recipient of the Tremaine Fellowship which is awarded annually at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics. He was selected for his outstanding work in numerical simulations in general relativity. In particular Foucart is studying mergers of black holes and neutron stars, and the long-term evolution of accretion disks.

At the time of the award, he had published five papers in 2012/13, among them:“Black hole-neutron star mergers for 10 M⊙ black holes” Phys. Rev. D 85, 044015 (2012) In this paper, Foucart and collaborators produced the first general relativistic simulations of massive black holes merging with neutron stars, trying to better clarify the collisions that produce the short gamma ray bursts detected in the universe. Until now, merger simulations had been limited to low mass black holes even though population models indicated that the majority of mergers might involve more common ten-solar mass black holes. Foucart broke through a technological and coding bottleneck to produce these more realistic simulations.

The Tremaine Fellowship is given annually in memory of Beatrice D. and Vincent J. Tremaine to honor their lifelong interest in mathematics, science and learning. The award was initially established at CITA by Vincent Tremaine in memory of his wife Beatrice when their son, Scott Tremaine, was the first director.